PUBLIC MARKS with search call-back

an interesting conclusion about how to turn new and casual contributors into long-time community members: the key is to distribute ownership.

To wrap up, there were several things that motivated me to stay active in the Mozilla community: * A belief in the mission of the project — to create a web browser that supports and promotes the use of open standards * An interest in the technology — initially with the Gecko logo as my hook * The feeling of belonging in a community of people with similar interests * The desire to give something back to a project that gave (and still gives) me the best browser in the world for free * The experiences gained by managing a website — HTML, CSS, server configurations, and perhaps most importantly, the English language * The recognition and respect from Mozilla project members for my contributions * The pride of being responsible for an important piece of the project

It is very important to report the WTF to the developer who produced the code. Subversions “annotate” or “blame” function provides a means to blame someone for the existence of a specific piece of code. The best way to report this back is through an informative and educational discussion, where everyone could be involved. The factoring should preferably be done by the developer responsible for the code, perhaps with the assistance of the developer who reviewed it. As a result, quality awareness will have improved within the development team.

A while back I wrote a little RDF vocab that extended the 2006 vCard vocab. It introduces a few extra terms which I thought were useful, mostly taken from the vCard 4.0 drafts at the time. e.g. a "lang" property to indicate languages spoken by the person represented. One other thing it has though is a more vCard-like way of representing telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, etc.

That is why I call the latest release 1.0, the complete one, with a tip of the hat to the engineers who, in less than two years, moved the OS from a painfully trimmed down port of OS X to a tiny ARM platform, creating a polished new user interface in the process. And giving birth to a new applications ecosystem, an unforeseen outgrowth of the iTunes platform.

Et encore, il manque la possibilité aux applications tierces de s'exécuter en tâche de fond. Même EPOC proposait le mutlitâche.

cityLAB, an urban think tank at UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design, announces a call for entries to “WPA 2.0: Working Public Architecture.” WPA 2.0 is an open competition that seeks innovative, implementable proposals to place infrastructure at the heart of rebuilding our cities during this next era of metropolitan recovery.

Folded in Place furthers the abstraction once offered by landscape photography by removing the place itself and replacing it with a mapped construction. This method leads the viewer to re-imagine the spectacle of the foreign lands and explore the abstraction of place offered by photography. The combination of still-life constructions and the maps’ reference to large and distant lands examines the paradox of known and unknown geographies offered by the photographic image. In this manner, Folded in Place turns the abstract representation of the map back into a physical landscape using photography to look at the map as a geography of its own.

OpenStreetMap, the wiki-style map of the world that anyone can edit, is in need of a new way to add content. I've been working on a way to "round trip" map data through paper, to make it easier to perform the kinds of eyes-on-the-street edits that OSM needs now the most, as well as distributing the load by making it possible for legible, easy notes to be shared and turned into real geographical data.

Walking Papers is a working service that implements this paper idea, based on initial technical experimentation from back in February.

What I think we need to investigate are designs of media, service and product that are resilient, and self-sustaining as far as possible. I like to call this “Thingfrastructure”

Print maps, draw on them, scan them back in and help OpenStreetMap improve its coverage of local points of interests and street detail.

Project plans and process ignorance

Project managers live and die by the project plan. It’s their bible. We know it like the back of our hand and we assume that everyone on the team does too, but to my surprise this is rarely the case.

Unfortunately, this lack of knowledge can reduce the effectiveness of the team, negatively impacting cost, time and performance. This article will explore the problem and suggest ways to remedy it.

Two clients of ours from Bethel University, Mark Erickson (Director of Web Communications) and Michael Vedders (Director of Web Technology), came to mStoner’s Chicago office for two days earlier in the month to work directly with us on the Bethel strategy document. The idea was that two days of intense collaboration and discussion would produce a more cohesive report, better suited to Bethel’s needs.

It Doesn’t Get Any More Old School than Paper and Scissors

Part of this two day process was an exercise that I like to call paper wireframing, or Pwireframing. It’s an idea that came to me based on a link that my colleague Laurel Hechanova sent me: The Design Police Visual Enforcement Kit. If you take a look at this page, it’s essentially a print-it-yourself sticker kit, laying out a bunch of funny “laws” you can stick to a piece of communication.